What a night — Berlin’s Judin Gallery didn’t just open two shows, it opened parallel worlds, each pulsing with its own fever. Located less than ten minutes walking from one another, the two West Berlin locations make for quite the experience, namely when seen in tandem. Walking into each space felt like stepping simultaneously into a dream and a memory lab, which is precisely the kind of overloaded simultaneity that the art world desperately needs.
Adrian Ghenie’s Cloud Fever sits us at a breakfast table, fork poised over eggs, but instead of savouring a meal his figures stare blankly at glowing screens. In The Breakfast (2025), the banal act of eating becomes a séance with a device — the canvas hums with the eerie quiet of isolation, punctuated only by the cold glow of digital light. This is definitely not just a still life; it is a depiction of Homo digitalis, a species slowly eroding its own attention and capacity for deep thought under the relentless algorithmic glare of our tiny pocket computers. Ghenie’s paint is clinical and observant. Like an anthropologist peering at a new human type, he seems to diagnose what Oxford recently coined as “brain rot” — the soft decay of discernment, the withering of authentic connection, and the scroll of doom into the ceaseless glow of the feed.
His new collection of works doesn’t really feel like a lamentation or longing for a bygone era, but rather a meditation on the horror show that is our present moment. In The Acrobat, a standout piece, Ghenie offers a quiet homage to Picasso’s Young Acrobat on a Ball, but here there is no circus joy and no audience. The figure is alone, dignified in its loneliness, balancing for no one but itself.
If Ghenie’s strength has always been his ability to excavate trauma, here he has transitioned from the historical to the present. His paint is almost forensic, but his concern remains human. He has pulled back the curtain on our very modern grotesque — not because it’s pretty, but because it’s real. The show feels like a warning, and one that seeps under your skin.
While Ghenie reads like a societal diagnostician, Alexander Basil concentrates on the self. Error 404 is Basil’s most intimate and rigorous project yet, though “self-portrait” feels like not sufficient enough a term for what this is. It is a bio-report, a visual autobiography unfolding canvas by canvas. Basil’s signature bald, rosy-skinned, almond-eyed archetype — his “prototype” — returns, but now with methodical purpose: he maps his body over time, from childhood to present, from scar to studio, from bath to birth. He charts his gender-affirming journey with almost obsessive clarity.
Oh, and WARNING! PENIS ALERT!
Some paintings feel like scientific diagrams. He shows the medical, physical, and emotional transitions: scarring, posture, surgery, recovery. A laptop displays surgical images; the bathtub becomes an observatory of self-change. And in one extraordinary canvas, Basil superimposes his own face onto that of Laurence Michael Dillon, the pioneering British trans man from the 1940s who underwent early phalloplasty. The doubling is haunting and gentle — less a symbol than a communion. Identity for Basil is not just painted; it is inhabited. By placing his face on inanimate objects, animals, even tarot figures, he dissolves the boundary between self and world. The paintings gaze back at us, as if insisting: we are all becoming, we are all speaking, even when we think we are silent.
I’ll say this: Basil is a psychic cartographer. He’s mapping a terrain few painters dare to explore — how selves are made, lost, and remade. He doesn’t flinch. And neither should we.
Taken together, Ghenie and Basil’s shows at Judin feel like a diagnosis of tuned-out worlds. Ghenie’s figures are absorbed by screens, while Basil’s are absorbed in self-construction. Ghenie diagnoses our social malaise; Basil diagnoses the body, the gendered, emotional self. One watches a species vanish into collective distraction; the other watches a self painstakingly built, rebuilt, reshaped. It’s not a bleak pairing — it’s urgent, tender, and unflinching. You leave Cloud Fever feeling the weight of a civilisation too wired to breathe, and Error 404 makes you feel the courage it takes to hold your body, your memory, your becoming in focus. This staging has it all: confrontation, mirror, and balm.
Placing these shows side by side was no accident. Judin has given us a diptych of crisis: one collective, one personal. Together, they feel urgent — two different but overlapping epidemics. Yet they speak to each other. One asks, What is the shape of our collective future? The other whispers, But what about me? That tension between “us” and “me,” between external chaos and internal struggle, is the pulse of this gallery moment. It’s not just two openings; it’s a conversation.
I walked into Judin on Friday with no expectations. What I left with was a jolt. Ghenie makes me fear for our wired future, while Basil makes me feel for our fragile selves. These are not comfort exhibitions. There is no buffer. And yet there is brilliance. There is care. There is, in both, a fierce intelligence and an emotional gravity that lingers long after you leave. If you do go, don’t just glance — linger. Let the paint read you back. I know it’s scary, but let the mirror crack, and then let it hold your hand through the pieces.
Gallery Judin
Mercator Höfe
Alexander Basil: Error 404
15 November 2025 – 24 January 2026
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Adrian Ghenie: Cloud Fever
Die Tankstelle
15 November 2025 – 18 January 2026
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